We Free the Stars (Sands of Arawiya 2)

She tilted her head, curious gazelle that she was. “Didn’t mean what?”

He tried but failed to stop the shadows leaching from his fingers. How was it that words were impossible, when drawing a blade and ending someone’s life wasn’t?

Because words cut deeper than swords.

He took a slow breath and lifted a hand to the back of his neck. Dropped it.

“What I said on Sharr. That it—that it meant nothing.” It was only after he spoke that he could look at her again.

In time to see her eyes drift to his mouth, to the burgundy linen of his qamis and back up again.

“What did it mean, then?”

Everything, he wanted to say, but there was a cloth in his mouth, woven from fear and suppression.

He’d been a fool to say what he’d said, he knew. He had closed the distance between them to stop her destructive path, to bring her to her senses, to distract her. He’d never expected to feel so much, to want so deeply, and that flood of emotion had terrified him.

She made a sound in the back of her throat when he said nothing, her disappointment damning, and then she was closing the door, bit by bit, as if waiting for him to put out his hand and stop her.

He was the crown prince, born to lead but forced to follow, follow, follow all his life.

And so he did nothing.

CHAPTER 11

Zafira pressed her head against the smooth wood and heard his heavy sigh on the other side, a reminder of how easily his aloof mask could fall apart.

Then, a long while later, his door slipped closed.

She knew there was more he wanted to say. There was chaos in his eyes and a barricade across his lips. She could have helped him along, but he was the prince. He should be more than capable. Skies, she was as pettish as Seif.

“Who was that?” Lana asked from the bed, wider than any Zafira had ever lain in. She spoke as if Zafira had just returned after a day of wandering through the stalls of the sooq. As if there weren’t a death or two strung between them and a new world cresting the horizon.

Again, Zafira waited for the burn of tears. Instead, there was a strange unraveling in her chest that made it easier to breathe.

Lana tilted her head, silently repeating her question. What could Zafira say—that he was a friend she had made? A boy she had kissed? A prince she must bow to? The assassin whose father was responsible for their mother’s death among hundreds of others?

“Nasir,” Zafira replied, setting aside the Jawarat. There we go. The world was full of Nasirs, wasn’t it?

Lana shot up. “As in the Prince of Death?”

Clearly not enough Nasirs.

“I wouldn’t … call him that,” Zafira said as Lana turned away so she could drop her clothes in a heap and sink into the cool bath.

“I didn’t know he would look nice,” Lana contemplated, and Zafira bit her lower lip, thinking of the crimson linen stretched across his shoulders, the little triangle of skin framed by his unbuttoned collar. The way the fabric of his sirwal clung to his thighs. He didn’t look nice, he looked … Zafira lifted her hands to her cheeks.

Something about knowing he was a short distance away when she wasn’t dressed terrified her more than the Arz ever had. It allured her more than the Arz ever had.

Lana came to the side of the tub. “You’re pretty when you’re happy.”

Zafira leaned her head against the rim. “I’m not.”

His soft voice caressed her ears. I didn’t mean it.

Some part of her had known it was a lie, even then. That moment between the marble columns was too real, too raw, filled with too much. It was how easily he spoke the lie that had angered her. How easily he would dismiss her, and himself.

“But you’ve caught the attention of the prince!”